Selling into Oil Patch: The RevOps Playbook

Welcome to the Oil and Gas Sales and Marketing podcast, where every week your hosts, Mark LaCour and Matt Bertram share proven strategies and real-world tactics to help you connect with customers and close more deals. Let's do this! Howdy, welcome back to another fun-filled episode

of the Oil and Gas Sales and Marketing Show. We are at the CellWell conference talking about selling into oil and gas, and I have a great guest for you today, Richard Byrd. He's a fractional CMO, president of Bluebird doing strategic marketing and sales.

He's got a long background like myself in marketing. I actually was a reverse. I was a sales guy that got into marketing. Big marketing guy got into sales, so I know we're going to have a lot to talk about. Yeah, well thanks for having me on the show.

Awesome. So, let's just set the table. If we're talking about oil and gas sales, what's the first thing that comes to mind? Well, I would say, to me, it's a couple things. So, I think it's long-sale cycles, complex buying centers, and having to really ride it out for a long time.

It can be a very challenging market, and that's when times are good and there's an upturn in the industry. When there's a downturn in the industry, it really gets hard. And the other thing too, I think, is when times are great, when you're $100 a barrel of oil, it's even harder to sell because they're too busy

and they're printing money and they don't want to buy anything else because they're making plenty of money. So, Richard, one of the things also that the ethos of how this podcast was formed is a market, and I believe that sales and marketing in oil and gas should be connected at the hip.

And we were talking about, before we got started, about, well, from the marketing side, you wanted to influence sales a little bit more. And I was on the sales side going, I need more leverage with marketing. And so, I am super excited.

So, there's CROs now, right? There's RevOps, which is starting to bring in finance. How would you view the relationship, typically, between marketing and sales professionals in the same organization? Yeah, well, you know, you're singing for my hymnal there, too.

So, we're really aligned to that because it took me a while to catch on that sales and marketing should be closely connected. I've worked for a large oil and gas services company before I started my own firm. And, you know, we were a company that was known for really cranking out shiny new objects

and selling them at a premium price. And I can tell you, we were guilty of not even letting the sales people know that we had just commercialized this major piece of technology. And they were like, what the heck, guys? You've got to at least let us know.

This is coming down there because our clients were asking them about it. We did a good job on the marketing side. And they were like, hey, you know, you didn't even tell us about it. And our customers are coming in asking us about these things that you've launched at OTC or whatever, you know.

Whatever the thing. Yeah, that crazy siloed. And then I went to a sales training there and we had just commercialized something. And there was a guy there that was talking about that new thing we commercialized.

And he was a long-term, you know, technical oil and gas sales guy, real smart engineer, converted to sales. Have you never seen that before in the oil and gas industry? But anyway, he came and he gave the worst sales presentation I've ever seen in my life with the ugliest PowerPoint I've ever seen in my life.

And he didn't hit any of the main value propositions that we had laid out for him in marketing. And then he didn't talk about any of the 5K studies we had already produced. And I thought, we got to do a better job about communicating this.

So that's really got me on my journey to do that. And now at Bluebird, we really preach that. And, you know, we've worked with a lot of software companies. And, you know, that's where I first learned about the RevOps model. Software does a good job of incorporating sales and marketing and product and service.

And, you know, it's something that really has to happen. And I think as part of our job as fractional CMOs, when it first started, we realized what we really did is we were fractional CMOs. So we'd have to work as a part of the team. And a lot of those companies were very siloed

between sales and marketing, too. And so what happened is we'd say, hey, we generate all these great leads for you guys. Go close them and just, you know, assume that they're going to go out and close those deals. And then they, you know, the deals didn't close.

And so what happens? The leads sucked, right? And so, and we're like, well, wait, they didn't seem like they were sucky leads. It was the right people, you know, right job titles at the right companies, right level of seniority, right geographies. Tell me why they sucked.

Well, it turns out they weren't ready to buy today. So they said this is a terrible lead because they're not ready to buy today. And I think when you have sales teams that are, that are kind of order takers or, you know, this kind of thing, they're like, hey,

especially in the, in the oil and gas industry, you know, people tend to get busy and so relationship driven and all those things that I think it's easy to say, well, look, that's not wasting my time on them. It's like, no, let's put them back in the marketing funnel and keep them warm because look,

it's because they're not ready to buy today. I mean, they're not going to be ready to buy tomorrow. And I think one stat that has really been driving our thoughts at Bluebird is the fact that at any one given moment, that only 5% of your total addressable market is ready to buy. And I got a pushback on that.

And they were like, that's, that can't be true. And I said, you're right. I think that number is probably most certainly incorrect. But I think directionally it's right. And I said, imagine if you were sitting in a room and there are 100 people in that room

and you said, how many people here sleep on mattresses? Well, probably all 100 people would raise their hand, right? But if you said, how many people in here are in the market to buy a brand new mattress? Well, yeah, today I got five or six people probably would raise their hand.

You go, well, there you go. That's, you know, directionally it's right. And I think if you're selling oil tools or oil-filled software or whatever, that's probably most certainly the case with that too. So I want to go down that path of demand generation and nurture.

But before that, I want to go back to RevOps. I feel like with oil and gas, more than almost any other industry, but certainly there are other industries as well as in software. But you have so much leverage to say, this is going to save you X amount of dollars.

Like if you're talking about big reg count or we're going to help you, like if you can speak the language of finance, right? And depending on who you're selling to, you can show the value of what you, that you're offering pretty easily.

Yeah. And I don't know if that is nomenclature that's being used all the time from salespeople to start to bring in the finance component and talk in the dollars and cents of what they can save. And there's so much scale out there

that a small percent increase of here or there could have a huge impact. Yeah. Well, that's one of the things I love about the oil field. Honestly, our prices are so meager compared to what they're making.

And I always say, look, if you're saving people $100 million or generating $100 million worth of oil and gas for a hydrocarbon for a client, well, guess what? They're probably not going to be as price sensitive if you can frame it around that. We're solving $100 million problem here, guys.

And yes, it's going to be $300,000 per run to drop this wire line tool down in this really expensive, you know, $100 million well. But if you can, you don't have to sidetrack it or you aren't going to lose the well because this problem is going to eliminate a lot of that risk for you.

Well, you have a very different discussion with the team than if you just go in there and try to sell them your fancy wire line service. No, I love that. So I think that we haven't talked a lot about or enough about on this show is that

nurture component of the cycle and really where marketing fits in. So they just, you know, go get us leads, right? Marketing, go get us leads, demand generation. People love to, you know, easy peasy, run some ads, target the right people, run some LinkedIn ads.

There you go. But you're only talking to 5% of the total addressable market for who's in the market to buy. And so the expectation and the alignment has to be set properly. For sure.

And I think that's one of the things that, a lot of times that's what people come to us for. Like that's what they think of when they think of marketing and we like a larger approach to marketing. We get into, we work with our clients even on product rationalization, pricing,

all the marketing stuff with a big M. And so they're like, we think marketing starts really early, like pre-commercialization. And we help a lot of, a lot of commercialization work to what we help with.

So I think, you know, for us, it's always been, you know, thinking about it broader, but so many people come in, they think they have a very narrow view of marketing. It's like, just get us some leads, get those deals in front of us,

and we got it from here. And I think a lot of times we... Or the brand inside, right? Or the conferences, right? They're like, marketing is conference collateral. Yeah, squeezy balls and camouflage baseball caps.

Yeah. Well, I mean, a marketing qualified lead, a sales qualified lead, they're the same thing. They should be. They should be, right? And, you know, we even skipped over sales qualified leads

and we go straight to opportunities. Because if it's not an opportunity, that's what really is, we're all talking about here. Now, can you close it and can you close it in a timely manner? That becomes another story.

And that's what, to your point, that's where nurturing comes in. What we found is, or the last stat I saw from Forster Research was that the average B2B cell requires 30 touches to get it over the line.

And I thought, you know, in oil and gas, that's probably just much higher. Because if you think about it, a lot of these big deals that people are working on in the oil and gas industry can take, average, I would say,

what we hear the most like 18 months sales cycle. We've had 24, we've had 36 months sales cycles before too. And so you go, wow, that is a really long time. So if you only talk to people at 30 times in 18 months, you're probably not going to win that deal, I would think, right? And you're probably only talking to about

one or two people in the buying committee. You're probably not being, you know, people, I think the oil and gas industry has a great job of protecting its people. And so you never know who all is going to be in your buying committee

and you most certainly won't get to talk to all of them. And so that's where, you know, I think marketing can really come in and help and start talking to some of those, talk around some of the people without the sales going to get in trouble for talking

out, you know, to somebody higher in the org, right? And going around them, they hate that. And I think that is, you know, I think you can do that through, email marketing is a big one because salespeople are so busy.

And I think you're the really best salespeople are ADD, myself included, and not that I'm the best salesperson, but I think, you know, I think that's something that, you know, and staying on top of deals is maybe hard for some salespeople. We have a concept that we like to talk about

and when it comes to salespeople, do you have zoo tigers or do you have jungle tigers? And so jungle tigers, you throw them in any environment and they're going to eat, right? They're going to eat.

And zoo tigers now, they like, they like for the zookeeper to bring them in some steaks and they'll eat those just fine, right? But they're not going to go killing in Paula tomorrow. And I think, you know, as we think about that in there,

like the thing with the jungle tigers, everyone's like, give me jungle tigers, but they're good, but they're going to lose interest really fast. And yeah, they're like, they're like, these guys didn't want to buy for me.

I'm going to go get something else, right? And then, but the zoo tigers are like, hey, I'll ride them. Like, I'll stay on them for a long time. I'll stay on that zookeeper until he brings me a good steak.

And so you need a both. And I think... I've heard hunters and farmers. I haven't heard the tiger analogy. I love it. Yeah, it's a fun concept.

So when we talk about these, you know, 36 month sales cycles or, you know, 24 month sales cycles, how do you set the tone for that kind of approach? Because, you know, you're trying to nurture demand. You're trying to harvest it over time.

And a lot of times when people approach a fractional CMO or a marketing agency, they have a pain point and they need demand. They need leads right now. Yeah.

It's not always a zoo environment, right? Yeah. Well, I think when we come in, that's certainly the expectation, right? It's one of the things that we really hold ourselves accountable to.

Bluebird is revenue. We're revenue focused. It's one of our core values. Relentlessly drive revenue for our clients. It's one of them. And I think, you know,

when you hold yourself accountable to revenue, it is a double-edged sword. Because people love it to hear about that in the sales process, but then you get fired for that if you don't do it. And so it can be very challenging to do that.

So what we are always looking for when we come in with a client. Impact. Yeah. What is low-hanging fruit? Yeah.

Because, yes, this multi, you know, $8 million deal that you want to do. Well, and by the way, you want to sell to a company you're not on the vendor list for yet. Well, guess what?

It's going to take a very long time to get on Chevron's vendor list. And they're going to have to go through a lot of qualifications. And this is not going to, this will work on that.

But this is, you know, we want to be there when you close this $8 million deal. But what are the things that we can do? You know, who are these, what are the deals that are already in your CRM?

And I think it's something that we really see a lot is, in the oil field, more than any other industry, I think is really neglected at CRMs, where the data is garbage.

People have not been really keeping track of their deals. I think a lot of salespeople in the oil and gas industry feel threatened by, you know, entering their information in there.

But there's only so many majors. There's only so many independents. Like if you're selling upstream, like there's a limited number of people, they're probably already in your CRM or somebody that works in the organization.

That's right. Well, we, I think that is a, well, and that's another one we see a lot too. It's like, you know, like, that's Bob, he's our,

he's Exxon is his account. And I'm like, oh, really? He's selling to everybody in Exxon all around the world. When's the last time you took a trip to Guyana? Really?

Really? Bob, you own all of Exxon? Come on. Let's, let's, let's share. I've seen that more than I would like to see. And there's some politics associated

with certain organizations for sure. Yeah. We see that a ton. And so it's like, you know, I remember there was a great far side comic and there was this beached whale

and there was this fly flying to the well. And he said, dibs. And there's all these flies behind him. Like, no, you can't eat that, buddy. So anyway, that's what I feel like every time I talk to a company who does that.

But yeah, you're right. And I think not only that, but those accounts, I think what we see too is a lot of times the rep feels like they own the account and because of a relationship there or what have you and they don't realize that really the company owns

the account. You might have a relationship with somebody there, but it's not your account. I mean, you could break it by division too or something like that. Yeah.

I mean, I've landed a number of accounts where I haven't touched the surface, right? And there's money to be there. There's budgets all around. Yeah. All right.

Have you noticed this too? At least this one we see a lot. It's peculiar behavior until you recognize why. But a lot of times in oil and gas space, we see people don't want to cross sell even within our own organization.

So this is one that I see a ton. And, you know, when I was working with a large oil and gas service company, we were really inquisitive and we acquired a drill bit company and we sold everything else in the oil field, you know, basically at that company.

And we're really strong in rotary steerables and metrology drilling measurements and all those things. And maybe just thought it was going to, we told the investors this is going to be a grand slam because we're just going to pull through all these drill bit cells into our other business.

And we were strong internationally. They were not strong internationally. And we didn't cross sell at all. It was bad. And we're like, what is going on? We even then start talking to the sales people.

Why won't you help sell drill bits? And they said, well, these are really smart people. These are not, you know, dummies. You know, like, well, we don't understand drill bits. We don't want to introduce the idea of drill bits and we just don't want to do it.

And we're like, well, would you make an introduction to the person who does know about drill bits? And they said, no, because we don't know them. We don't like them. We don't trust them. They're not part of our organization.

What if they ruin our relationship? Yeah. These are the three big things, right? Like, oh, yeah. This happens. And it was really fascinating to me.

And the trend I've noticed is the smarter the sales person, the less likely they are to cross sell. And I think we're landed on that after puzzling it for a while is they're used to looking like experts. And they want to be seen as smart, like most Elvis do, right? And they don't want to look stupid by representing,

you know, by suggesting something that somebody says, hey, what about this? And instead of saying, like, I'm stupid. So I don't mind making introductions because I know I'm stupid. And so I'm like, yeah, I don't know the answer to that question because I don't know the interesting.

But look, let me introduce you to my friend Matt. He can tell you all about that stuff. Let's go get beers. Let's go to lunch. I'll make the introduction. Yeah.

I think mindset and positioning are really important. And the education piece is critical. I've found moving up the organization, like, right? Moving into a fractional role with the company and getting a better viewpoint where you tap into more things is certainly helpful or a consultant that comes in

and gets a wider view. But I think it's that modality switch to, you know, selling these different things to get the questions you don't know and how is this relationship going to impact that? But man, like, if you are adding value, right? By introducing that.

Like, anytime you introduce two people and if they do business together, you get some kind of benefit from that. Like, I think that social media has started to change that too because also it was very kind of secretive of who knew who and, you know? Yeah.

I don't know. It's weird. It's weird. Yeah. It's something that, you know, really, we like to do it. And so we're always introducing our clients and, you know,

hey, you guys are selling to these guys, but you don't do this. Do you know this guy over here? Let me make an introduction. And I think our clients love it even if they can't make a deal out of it. And they're like, well, this guy is kind of funny. I think it starts within, like I said.

Like, it's like a confidence component of, like, how you view the world. Are you, like, in salespeople, right? Abundance mindset. Yeah. Right? Scarcity mindset.

Like, I think that that's that core belief of that fear is probably where it starts. I don't know that or I don't have that education. That's really interesting. I'm just thinking out loud here. But, you know, I think maybe it's, you know, maybe it's because of the boom and bust cycle of all this, you know?

There's nothing like an oil bust that'll create a scarcity mindset. I remember the day that oil went negative. I definitely had a scarcity mindset that day. I did buy that day. It doesn't make any sense. My dad was in the oil field, so I grew up in, you know, a steak and lobster one night

and hot dogs and beans the next. And when that happened, I called him. I was like, you ever seen this? You ever seen it go negative? He's like, no, I've seen it in the single digits, but I've never seen it go negative.

That's the real world. What are you doing with AI? And I would love to hear what for like a company that's approaching the oil and gas space, right? So a lot of people that listen start to listen because they want to sell into oil and gas. Sure. Right?

Yeah. But they don't know where to start. They know that there's a moat there. They're trying to understand that. What's a good marketing sales kind of account based selling strategy that doesn't work all the time because it depends, but is a good place to start with the framework when they're

going to market? Man, that's a good question. So you mentioned a couple of things there. So AI is, you know, that's always the... And it should be incorporated into everything. That's my answer.

Yeah. We like it. You know, we'd use it for a lot of things. And one of the things we use it for a lot is research, right? Man, the oil and gas industry, I saw somebody and they said, I'm an oil and gas expert. And I said, that's how exactly I know you're not an oil and gas expert because no oil and

gas person would say, I'm an expert in oil and gas because you can't be. You can't be an oil. It's a big industry. Right? And so if you said, look, I'm a drilling fluids expert, I will buy that. Right?

And so, but I think to do that research for us, we have to come in and understand this, this special niche from, you know, sucker rods to, you know, fancy software to, you know, all these things. And so we use it a lot for that. And that really helps. It helps a lot.

We have AI note takers. Oh, yeah. I think, you know, I'm the CEO of my company and I forget that sometimes. And so I'm like, we need to, we need some more AI tools. We need to really get, we need to understand. And I'm like, whoa.

I was like, I was kind of thinking out loud. God, I didn't mean everybody come in with a whole new tool and try to incorporate in our business. So we're trying to, we're trying to get some governance around that now. But yeah, there's no shortage of tools for that. I think as far as to bring it around to the point of the, you know, actually, you know,

penetrating into the oil and gas space, I think it is an account based marketing. You just nailed it. It's perfect, right? So because I think, you know, so many of our clients, they might have, if they really think about it, they might have 2,000 customers across the world. They're actually going to be the ones that say yes to this niche service.

And I think, you know, finding those people now is a lot easier than it used to be. And so with, you know, doing research on it with Zoom Info is a tool we like for, you know, finding that and like kind of building out those buying committees and thinking, well, that's the other thing too, as I'm thinking about the whole buying committee, because I think that's, that's a big one. I think, like with decks, right?

People need to know those decks are getting passed around. So I like when decks are behind, they're happening. You know that, like, hopefully this is going to get to other people on the buying committee and I might not be able to speak to them. So I need to speak through whatever I'm leaving or what I'm doing. You know, I think that inbound marketing doesn't quite sit where people think it should.

But the buying process, the statistic I saw and I wish I could reference who is something like 75% of the buying is happening before someone picks up the phone. And also after they, you know, you pitch in or whatever, you meet somebody, they could do a ton of research on you. You've got to make sure your brand is on point across all the different channels. You want to have the right messaging.

This is when we have clients come to us, many times we're like maybe going through a website redesign. They're like, did you write this? And then we're like, no, this was on your website. This has been on your website for X number of years. So people need to think about that. And the big thing right now that I'm personally focused on is like LL invisibility.

Like how are you showing up as an entity? Because there's Matt Bertram and there's Matthew Bertram. Okay, I've been operating. If you look at all these books here, I have some as Matthew Bertram, some as Matt Bertram. I could go into details. I've written some blogs on this, but you need to start thinking about how you're associated

with other things online, how people are viewing you, your job titles change. If you don't post online, that's saying something too. And if you do, so if you're a salesperson and you're reaching out to somebody and you have no social presence, how is someone going to connect with you? Is this a scam? Like that's the first thing I think.

Like if someone doesn't have a presence online. So there's just a lot to consider, I guess. Oh yeah. Well, you know, that's an interesting one too. Because I think, you know, I've been a lifelong marketer and, you know, I've been in BD for a long time now and all that stuff.

And I was an early doctor on LinkedIn and all that. And so it just, it shocks me how people, we'll still talk to people. I talked to somebody last week in the oil and gas space and they're like, well, we only do LinkedIn and I don't want to do LinkedIn. And I was like, well, I hate to break it to you, but you're the CEO of this company. And people want to know what you have to think.

Yeah. It's like, you're going to have to, hey, get a LinkedIn account with a nice photograph and you're going to have to, we're going to start producing some content for you because it's expected this. It's, it's table. 4% of people or some of the, the statistic is a little dated, but I still,

I don't think it's much higher than that globally produced content on LinkedIn. Once, once it was like, maybe once a week or once a month, just one post. Cause there's so many people that have profiles, but yeah, people don't have updated information as well as like updated pictures. I've seen, seen that it's pretty wild. And I was actually, I was recruiting.

I was oil and gas recruiter and LinkedIn was like the number one source. Cause if they posted their information and filled it out, I knew that they were trying to, you know, advertise themselves. And so it was like, they should do it. But yeah, the world, the world's changed a lot. And I feel like LinkedIn's become, since they've added the video component, the tick

talk for business. Yeah. Right. I mean, so, and it gets indexed and it's a big, it's a big piece. I just, the branding piece, the marketing piece, it's all layered, right? It all kind of works together, but you're sending a lot of signals.

And if you're 30 touches, I mean, there's a lot of different things. There's a lot of different things to consider. And that's maybe why those salespeople don't want to like bring another vector into what's going on. Cause they want to try to control what they could, you know? Yeah, for sure.

Value creation. Yeah. So what are your thoughts on some of that? I know I was being a little ADD myself. Yeah. No, that's good.

I was tracking right with you. So I'm ADD too. So that's great. No, I think for sure that's one of the things that we, we noticed was the, that a lot of these oil and gas salespeople that we've worked with in the past were, they weren't on LinkedIn. And we were, and so we offered a free social selling training.

Yeah. Just was like, look, if you guys are going to be the ones closing the deals, it would really be good if you're active on LinkedIn. And just for what you said, you know, people are going to go, they're going to look about, they're going to look at things. And I think that idea of what I said earlier about people, or maybe I didn't say it here

soon, somebody else, but, you know, everybody thinks about B2B as, you know, business to business, of course. But I got to tell you, there's no such thing as it's always people to people, you know, people don't buy anything from a business, people buy something from another person. And at the end of the day, you know, they're going to make connections with those people. So one of the frameworks that, that we typically follow is something called 711-4.

Have you heard that? No, totally not. Okay, this is great. So seven hours of content consumption, okay, or engagement. That's why conferences are so valuable, right? You get to know somebody and you get to spend a lot of time with them.

And if, if you're comparing yourself against somebody that's going to win a deal, you know, whoever spends the most time with them is going to have that no, I can trust kind of rapport component, right? And then they need to see your brand, logo, face, whatever. This also works in social settings for anybody out there that's in the oil field that's maybe still dating.

Seven hours, okay, is a magic number for humans to get to that threshold of like their personal life, like you kind of cross a barrier where they're going to talk to you, they're going to trust you. There's the public face, right? And then there's the professional base. And then they got to be familiar with you.

So 11 times, that's where advertising, that's where, you know, seeing you, you bump into somebody enough times, you start to recognize them, right? And then they need to see you in different places and different modalities to start making those entity associations. So four different channels. So we operate under a 711-4 format.

And so long form content kind of circling back to LinkedIn and that channel is a way to stay in touch with your prospects, even when you're not, one of the coolest things about LinkedIn is that algorithm, if we friend each other, I know you're going to see my stuff for the next 30 days. Like I know you are. So if I know that and you're one of my target list that I want to reach, I can push out

content in a way that knows that you're probably going to run across this, find it on your own. And now there's not that hard selling, that hard selling is just not here anymore. It's kind of changed. Yeah. I think the hard sell is tough nowadays.

We have a concept called commission breath. Someone mentioned that earlier, yeah. So I learned that from Ken Proctor. He's my Vistage chair, but yeah, he talked about commission breath. It's so true. I think one of the things that we always like to preach to our clients when we're doing

sales training is this idea that if the prospect thinks that you're in it for yourself and you're just trying to make quota and you're just trying to feast on them, they're not going to want to do business with you, right? Like nobody. I mean, that's why people, sales people get a bad rap sometimes, you know, because everybody's bought a car and they were there with the car salesman that had massive commission

breath and so they just turned off on it. So that's also why. And buyer's remorse. Yeah. All right. But that's why nobody wants to talk to sales until they're 70 to 90% of the way through

the sales. They're like, let me do my own research. I don't want this guy trying to rip me off. I'm going to, I'm going to figure it out myself as much as I can. And I'll talk to him when I absolutely have to buy. We've done pre-recorded webinars with a lot of success as well as kind of 1-800 numbers

based on, I work in and out of oil and gas and we are targeting older demographic, a 1-800 number that they could call and listen to before they talk to us. Or you could run into like a Vimeo channel where you could like record and see how much they saw before you followed up with them. And so we've tried to incorporate that we're giving them the information in a way that it's like they're approaching us in their own time.

Yeah. We've found a lot. We've had a lot of like with the webinars, not the, not so much live, right? Because live webinars, we get like, you'll get like 500 people show up or, you know, say they're going to show up and then they forget about it or whatever. And have you seen the new webinar strategy?

Like people are just putting it on my calendar. They're finding my email address and they're just, that's like the new thing. They just put them all over my gun. Drives me crazy. And I'm like, I was like, what is this and they're really good at naming it. Right.

And so I'm like, oh, maybe. Well, mine's really tricky. I have an executive assistant and she's like, made my life so much better. But I, and she, some random stuff comes on my calendar and I was like, Missy, what is this? Yeah.

And she's like, no. She's like, I didn't, I don't know what that is. I just saw it turn up yesterday. I thought you put it on. Yeah. Get that out of here.

Spam is just overtaken and the AI is just going to make it worse. I think you're right. I think it's going to, I think it's going to get way worse and way smarter. Yeah. We got a scam the other day. It was like, it was a PO sent to me and they had the whole check or email chain down below

and it's, and they were sent this to my accounts payable person and said, from me saying pay this immediately. And yeah. And I was like, no, don't do that. But so yeah, I think, I think AI is going to really change a lot of stuff. And I think there's going to be a, I think it, I think salespeople and marketing people

can ruin a lot of things sometimes. And I think they're going to, if you don't, I'm afraid that we're going to overuse these AI tools and it's going to ruin that personal connection and be really careful. One of the things that I've seen in oil and gas as well as like distribution that have done things the old school way, we're moving into this new phase of AI and they're just getting comfortable with like the web 2.0 social media component, right?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Social media component. A client had got, we started doing a lot of visibility stuff and I don't know if it's because of what we did or not, but they got a PO that came in through the website.

Someone talked on the phone provided like fake paperwork, ordered like $100,000 or something of stuff. The salesperson shipped it and then I don't know all the details, but found out that it wasn't even real. And so they sent off to somebody like $100,000 or more of equipment and stuff because how to deal with online leads is different than in the trenches and face to face.

Oh yeah. And so there's, like you were talking about kind of the governance component of what's happening with AI, I think that there's a lot of businesses that need to upgrade or upskill how they're doing business. And to do business online, there's a lot of things that you have to learn and is your company prepared or you position properly is your team educated for some of the stuff.

And I like how you talked a lot about kind of that education for the salespeople on LinkedIn. I think that that's so much bigger of a component that's not maybe addressed that maybe could be. Yeah. I think education to me is super important. We had a client that they wanted to commercialize a new thing and they did, but the sales guys

didn't want like it. They didn't see the value proposition. It was going to be more expensive. It was a new thing to sell. They were kind of used to kind of going picking up the orders and, you know, sell a million dollars a month that way and they're happy.

They're really happy with the old way of doing it and they didn't want to do the new way and they didn't want to sell the new thing and they refused to do it. And they, you know, if you're selling a million dollars a month, you can you can refuse to do a lot of stuff, right? And so as long as you're making your numbers and so what we did was that we can make them do it, but we educated them on how much better it's going to be for them, how much bigger

their commission checks are going to be with this and how their customers are going to love it and how they were going to really love driving their hundred thousand dollar pickup truck to work if they sold this and that education process made all the difference. And I think, I think that education could solve, solves a lot of problems in the oil field. We're coming close to time.

I would love to just finalize, I think we talked about a little bit, but the go-to-market strategy like framework, like for businesses that are listening, for sales people are listening, like just connect the dots, even if you did it, like let's just tighten it up maybe in a little clip for if you're going to create a go-to-market strategy and you haven't done that before and you want to, you know, focus on account base selling, what are some of the components you should be thinking about?

Well, for me, I'm an oversimplifier and so for me, marketing is one of those things that I always like to say, it's simple, but it's not easy. And the simple part is that marketing, all you have to know is three things. Who are we talking to? What keeps them up at night and how do we solve that problem better than anyone else in the world?

And once you understand that, you have one last question and that's where can I find these people? Because then you go and you build your strategy around that and then I think, you know, what do we have there, you know, to unpack it because it does sound really simple, but you know, you have to understand your target market is, who all is involved in that buying committee, who's can say no.

I think that's one of the things I find interesting about the oil field is that, you know, the many times the buying centers are very misaligned, so procurement is there to save money and find a reliable vendor that's not going to make them look bad, but the engineering side of things, they were looking for somebody that is helping them solve a technical challenge at the end of the day, right? And then safety people are looking for somebody that's not going to come in and get anybody's

finger cut off and, you know, all those people have all these different things that they're accountable for. And I think that is, you've got a line that you're messaging around that. So that can be a little more challenging, but so the who we're talking to, you're talking to more people than you think you are. But anyway, that's my frame, that would be my advice.

I love it. Do you have a LinkedIn failure tip of the week, or do you want that to be it? Yeah, I got my tip of the week. So I have three, video, video, video. I think video is one of those things that we see perform so well on LinkedIn. It is short little clips.

People like it. People really will, you know, I'll write a post myself about, you know, driving people to this really long, you know, well thought out, well crafted, really thoughtful blog. And then, you know, I get, you know, five people click it, right? I make a little video about my dog and I get millions of views, right? And so you go, wow, that's crazy.

And so I think, but I really do think that people love connecting with other people. And that's what you're there to do on LinkedIn. And I don't think there's any other format video that will help you do that. Well, I think that leads in perfectly to how do people find you, what's your LinkedIn profile? Yeah, I'm not on LinkedIn. No, I'm joking.

Yeah, I'm on, I'm on LinkedIn. The company website is thebluebird.com. And it's Richard Byrd, B-Y-R-D is where you'll find me on LinkedIn. Awesome. Well, Richard, thank you so much for coming on the show. I really appreciate being on.

It's great. We'll have to continue this conversation over some beers one day. Absolutely. So everyone make a difference, not a sale. Thanks for listening to OGGM, the world's largest and most listened to podcast network for the oil and energy industry.

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